


Erased Song

by coricomile



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, M/M, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:14:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24447904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/pseuds/coricomile
Summary: Patrick Stump is a rat in a city filled with rats.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 13
Kudos: 25





	Erased Song

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how I didn't already post this. Hi. Here's some robot love.

Patrick Stump is a rat in a city filled with rats. He slithers out at night to the neon districts, halogen burning star cams watching him from above like predators. Like hungry, circling hawks. The illegal mods in his hats make him fuzzed out to the feeds, block the sensors from picking up his face. He's a step ahead for now, but the city's got a never ending supply of funds and an insatiable urge to beat them into submission.

Patrick was not born to submit.

Greta has no new parts for him when he hits the valley. In the sodium lights, her skin glows pearl white, the flash of her stomach under the whispery blacks of her work outfit enough to make Patrick fidget. The bright yellow of her hair isn't quite right, threaded too tight against her scalp. Like this, she doesn't look real. Like this, it's easy to remember that she isn't.

"I'm sorry, baby circuit," she says. Her voice sounds like music. She had been programmed to be a singer. These days, the only singing she does is from between the sheets. "Business boomed."

"Thanks for looking anyway," Patrick says. Disappointment weighs heavy in Patrick's chest. Greta's his best source. He's been trying build a processor for the old desktop he'd found in the basement of a tech-runner's hideout but has been striking out on each attempt.

Most days the techs talk to him. He just has to feel them over, take a nice look at their insides, and they whisper all their secrets straight into his fingers. People call him techconnect when they're being polite. Most people aren't polite. Least of all the iron sharp patrolbots that control the streets. Least of all Big Brother, high up in the spire in the center of the city.

When he was a tiny circuit, barely big enough to hold a soldering gun, he’d linked in with a patrolbot on the street. The flash of lights and code that ran behind his eyes had stopped him flat out in the middle of the road. Too young to control himself, he’d jammed the system. The patrolbot went down in a hail of shuddering sparks that had singed Patrick’s hands in diamonds, pain the only thing that stopped the code feed to his brain.

The scars still show, sometimes, under his homespun grafts. The scars on his chest from the lasers from the rest of the patrol are harder to fix.

He’s older now, past his third fifth year birthday. Most days he keeps holed up in the basement he calls home, curled up on the nest of sheets with Joe for warmth. He works on his techs and listens to Joe read book after book about sunshine and summer weather, things they’d only heard about when they were young. They can’t remember a time when there wasn’t the constant hum of air generators running a false winter to keep the cybernetics cool.

He isn’t due back to the basement for a few hours. If he runs, he can probably catch Vicky in the green light. She usually doesn’t have much for him, but when she does have parts they’re pretty high class. Being young and quick with his hands sometimes has its benefits when dealing with the citizens. They’re becoming lifeless at alarming speeds but some of them still see the city as it was once.

There’s the wail of a siren in the distance. Hackers. Kids trying to breach the mainframe to bring back their dead friends from the belly of the system. The green light’s out. The blue district, too. He leaves the systems to their own- nothing in them for him, not a damn memory inside the wires that would mean anything- but he doesn’t want to know what will happen to him if the patrols catch him. Techconnects are rare; he doesn’t want to be a collector’s item. Doesn’t want to wind up as ash under the city.

He circles the valley carefully, one hand to the walls. Above him, the star cams pulse. He doesn’t know if the tech in his hat is enough to fool them while they’re in search mode. He’s close to the warehouse district anyway. While he’s hiding out he can raid the dumpsters for parts, see if there’s any scrap decent enough to take home.

If anything, he can always bring home something interesting for Joe.

The warehouse district has been abandoned for as long as Patrick can remember. Still, he slips through the streets, gloves to the walls, quiet like the rat he is. Abandoned doesn't mean unwatched. There's no place Big Brother doesn't touch in the city. Patrick's never been brave enough to try to leave, no matter how bad it’s gotten. A known hell is safer than an unknown one.

When he’s far enough in to be out of earshot of the sirens, Patrick crawls under a fence and slinks off towards the closest dumpster. His jacket catches on the fence, ripping up the side. It’s old, snatched away from someone who had been unlucky enough to no longer need it. A new one- a real new one, not an acquired new scrap- would cost him hundreds of credits that he doesn’t have. The fewer falsies he passes off, the easier it is for them to keep under the radar. Joe might be able to patch it up, if he’s feeling up to it.

The dumpster in the back has an old autolock holding it shut. Patrick skims his bare fingertips over it, the cold snaking up under his skin. The nice thing about old techs, he thinks, is that they don’t even need to be hacked. He slides his thumb over the interface and watches the zeroes spin. When the click of it opening sounds, Patrick takes a last glance over his shoulder. No patrolbots. No lights. No sirens.

Just him and the star cams and Big Brother.

Patrick skitters up the side of the bin, toppling over the edge. Above him, the lid slams down, shutting out the light. Patrick’s shoulders go loose. In the dark, there’s nothing to be afraid of. He skims his hands over the scraps under him, listens to the techs talk. Communes with the rest of the trash.

There’s an abandoned credit scanner and a warped, shrunken circuit board. Patrick pockets the circuit board and swipes the humming, dying generator from the scanner. He doesn’t have a use for them quite yet, but there’s no use wasting resources. His fingerless gloves make his palms sweat, the leather worn and soft against his skin. He wants to take them off, but too much contact with the techs make him itch. It’s getting better, but he still can’t control it by himself.

Patrick passes over something unfamiliar, the feel of synthskin almost lost as the tech’s code runs behind his eyes. He doesn’t get the chance to figure out what the tech is because suddenly the code blares red and then the tech is moving.

Patrick screams. The sound echoes off the walls of the dumpster and feeds back into his ears even as he scrambles away. There’s a whir, the faint click of a tech turning on after a long time idle, staccato and hesitant. Fuck. If he just activated a dormant patrolbot, he’s screwed.

He jumps, slams his hands into the lid of the dumpster. There’s the static blue glow of the bot’s eyes opening, but Patrick doesn’t look back enough to see its type. He’d felt the importance of it. If it’s a patrolbot, he’ll be dragged down into one of Big Brother’s many rooms. If it’s a rogue, he’ll be dead before he can access a serial code.

He hits the ground running, shins aching from the impact. The star cams aren’t any brighter than they were before and the sirens have stopped, but Patrick doesn’t risk it. He runs past his lung capacity, vaulting over abandoned hovers and cracks in the pavement. The cams are probably tracking him. He hopes like hell that his hat is doing its job.

The pain in his chest nearly makes him double over. If he were rich, he’d put in an expansion on his lungs. If he were rich, he would do a lot of things. Instead, he has to push through it, aching all the way down into bones. He doesn’t go straight home. It kills him, but he runs the course around the buildings twice before diving into the open window of their basement.

He lands on top of Joe. At least he’s softer than the concrete.

“Hey,” Joe wheezes, the sound of his voice muffled under Patrick’s panting. Carefully, Patrick rolls off of him and onto the cement floor. His heart is going to beat straight out of his chest.

Joe hovers, his giant coat making him loom large. For a second, Patrick can’t see him quite right, black spots dancing in front of his eyes. When the world comes back into focus, the first thing Patrick sees is the smear of oil on Joe’s cheek. The second, the rag he’d tried to clean himself off with. Working on the techs alone, even though Patrick’s fought with him about it for months. If he starts a fire or melts a pricey piece down, Patrick won’t be able to help.

“There’s grease on you,” Patrick says. Joe smiles sheepishly and wipes at his face with the cuff of his jacket. The milky grey of his eyes look bright against the fabric. In the dark, they almost look like a bot’s.

“I worked on the processor,” Joe admits. The black smudge has only managed to smear across his face, worked back into the loose fall of his unruly curls. “I think I got it running.” Patrick ignores him, instead sliding a glove off and reaching up to rub it away. Joe feels warm under his skin. Human. Real.

“Don’t make me get on you about it, techie.” Patrick hopes his breathing has slowed enough to pass off. He doesn’t want to worry Joe any more than he probably already has. There’s no use in telling him that they might be in danger. He can’t risk taking Joe out under the star cams to move him. He can barely risk taking himself out.

“Yeah, yeah. Just because you couldn’t do it.” Joe shoves him and curls up on his chest. His skin is freezing. Patrick’s been gone too long. “Think they’d find us if we built a heater?” Patrick shrugs and slides a hand into the warm space under Joe’s jacket. The answer is yes. Nothing calls down the patrolbots faster than heat.

“Shut up and sleep, techie,” he says instead. “I’ll look at the processor in the morning.”

Joe, he’s been blind since he was six, eyes lasered out by a faulty security system. Patrick had found him curled up on the street, blood on his hands, crying loud enough to set off more alarms. At barely seven, Patrick had been smart enough to know that the bots would come, that something bad would happen if he didn’t get the crying, bleeding kid off the street. He hadn’t been big enough to lift him up, had barely been strong enough to get him to his feet at all.

When they had reached Patrick’s little cubby hideout, Joe had finally stopped sobbing. Patrick cleaned his eyes and wrapped them up with a shirt he’d gotten too big for, talked until his little throat hurt with it. It had been forever since there had been anyone but him.

“Baby circuits gotta stick together,” Patrick had said as he tucked Joe into his little pile of blankets. “I’ll take care of you.”

Eight years later, not a whole lot has changed.

Joe is warm, the scratch of his jacket familiar. Patrick rubs his back, feels the stretch of real skin under his fingertips instead of metal and synth, and listens to him breathe. If Big Brother comes for them tonight, Patrick wants this to be his last memory.

\---

Time means nothing underground. Patrick wakes up three times, sweating under Joe’s weight, heart pulsing in his throat. If Big Brother had been alerted, they would have come already. Patrick tries to hold onto that thought, but the shine of an activating bot is lodged into his brain, stuck behind his eyelids. Carefully he shakes himself free of Joe, laying him out on the blankets gingerly.

If nothing else, he can at least check out the processor. Joe’s almost as good at feeling out the techs as he is. It’s probably running at full speed, glitches worked out clean. Patrick boots it up, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Joe’s undisturbed by the light. When he looks up from the small, curled huddle of blankets, he catches a movement at the window.

Fuck.

Quietly, he steps between the window and Joe, blocking him off. There isn’t another exit. Patrick’s heart pounds in his chest as he waits, trapped in. There’s an old stungun in their workbench but it’s locked up, hidden away from Joe’s wandering fingers. Patrick wishes desperately for a nano that he wasn’t so fastidious. If the thing outside is going to break in, he doesn’t have time to slip the lock free. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

The window creaks open, light from the star cams seeping in. For a few long, thunderous moments, Patrick can’t breathe. He sees a foot slide into the window, a dark hand. It looks human until the glint of a port at the thing’s wrist gives it away as a bot. Patrick can’t move.

Silently, the bot drops down onto the floor, landing in a crouch, one hand pressed to the cement. It’s dressed in vibrant colors, a sharp contrast to the blacks and greys Patrick and Joe stick to, to the sterile white of the citizens.The dark hair covering most of its face oil slick, sticking the the dark outline of its face. It’s not a patrolbot, but that doesn’t make anything safer. Patrick prays it isn’t armed.

As the bot straightens up, his- definitely a male model bot, jaw strong and shoulders filled out- looks up, eyes landing on Patrick.

“What do you want?” Patrick asks, voice like rusted metal. The bot glitches. His arms spasm, head jerking to the side with a squeal of gears. Joe moans quietly, pressing his face into the blankets. Patrick steps closer to him as the bot whines. “What do you want?”

The bot glitches again, creeping forward. He raises a jerking hand, the bent port dug into its wrist surrounded by dark spots in the synth skin. A burnout. The thing shouldn’t be able to turn on, let alone function enough to be moving. A spark shoots, and Patrick is going before he can think, lunging at it before it can get near Joe or their bed of blankets.

They go down hard, the thud of them hitting the ground enough to make Patrick’s teeth clack together painfully. He grabs at the bot’s throat, slamming its head against the cement. He hears the metal of its skull clank, but it’s muffled. He’d forgotten that his gloves were off.

The script flying behind his eyes is heavily encoded, wrapped up tight in symbols and etchings instead of binary. It flashes, whole strains missing from the code, a warning red wall looming in the distance. Patrick’s rips himself free of the bot, toppling off gracelessly, throat tight as he tries to force himself to breathe. The symbols stay burned into his vision for a few moments, green and black and red, making him dizzy and breathless.

Virus program. Walking- presumably once talking- virus program.

The bot twitches again. Patrick can hear its motors whirring, can feel the heat pouring from it. If there’s charring all the way on the outside of its skin, its insides should be a total wreck, wires burned out and melted, processors completely useless. Patrick doesn’t understand. This bot, it’s not playing by the rules.

Hot, stiff fingers close around his wrist, iron grip painful. Patrick squeezes his eyes shut. The script, it’s too much for him to handle. It rains down around him, the glitchy bot leeching off him until he falls into it and can’t see anything but code for miles. He’s never seen anything this expansive. He feels a spark hit his cheek, hears Joe waking up, and then the world goes red.

\---

Patrick gets sick before he’s even really awake. He chokes on it, bile like acid as it hits his cheek, bubbles out of his mouth. He’s still on his back, shaking on the floor like he’s tweaked out. He can’t see, can’t move, can’t do anything but cough and cough and cough, throat closing up. There’s hands on his back, and then he’s being pushed onto his front, head spinning.

The acrid, cloying smell of vomit is directly in his nose, his throat burning with it. He coughs again but it clears his throat this time, thick, viscous bile dripping down from his mouth. It’s disgusting, makes his dizzy head swim. His bare hands look red. Burnt.

“You’re okay,” Joe’s saying, over and over, rubbing Patrick’s back. ”You’re okay. I got you.”

When Patrick can see again he sits up, head screaming as he moves. Joe helps him, steadying him when Patrick nearly falls back over. He needs to wash. The stench of his insides clings to him, makes his empty stomach roil.

“Where’s the bot?” Patrick rasps out. It hurts to talk. He doesn’t know how long he was out. There’s no light from outside to judge, but there’s never light from outside. Patrick clutches his head and moans softly when Joe rubs at his temple with a steady thumb.

“In the corner,” Joe answers. He leans in, breath hot against Patrick’s cheek. “Patrick- it’s. He wouldn’t let you go. I couldn’t make him.”

“You shouldn’t have tried,” Patrick snaps. He feels Joe recoil and instantly feels sorry. Fucking baby circuit. “Sorry. Just. It was malfunctioned. Could have put the whole place up in smoke.”

“That’s the thing- I could smell the burnt skin, but-” Joe breaks off. His hand disappears, the soft sound of his steps moving away like exploding bombs between Patrick’s ears. A few moments later, Joe lays the dormant bot in front of him, wavery under its weight. “Feel.” Joe holds up one of its arms, shoving the sleeve of its jacket up.

Patrick doesn’t have to feel it out- he can see the way the bot’s skin has repaired itself back to almost perfection. The burn marks are still there, black and winding, twisting like veins- tracing his wiring probably, Patrick thinks- but the melted off spots have evened out. He doesn’t risk touching them, but he can see the way they’re raised, just a little.

“Take his jacket off,” Patrick directs, shoving himself up.

His head spins, but he manages to steady himself with a hand on the wall. He grabs his fingerless gloves and shoves them into his pocket. Those he’ll need later. Right now he needs something with a little more coverage. Behind him, he can hear Joe grunting as he works the old fashioned coat off the bot.

He finds a pair of full coverage gloves in the workbench. They’re a little greasy, but Patrick pulls them on anyway, flexing his fingers inside them. A bit stiff, but they’ll do. When he gets back to Joe, the bot is topless, resting against the wall.

The burn marks stop at his elbow joints. Patrick crouches down next to it, carefully running his fingers over them. His touch is stunted through the leather of the gloves, but he was right. The marks are raised like implants. There’s a crisscrossing pattern circled around his throat, thick like stitches, like he’d been sewn together on the inside.

“Joe,” he says, looking over his shoulder. Joe’s head is cocked, his blank eyes unfocused. He’s listening to Patrick’s inspection. “Feel over them. Is the skin smooth?”

Joe does as he’s told, fingertips running from wrist to elbow. He sits back on his heels when he’s done, says, “feels like regular synth.”

Patrick examines the burns, eyes crossing under the scrutiny. There’s a thin layer of synth over top of them. It’s almost like it grew into place. Carefully, he lets the bot’s arm drop and sets forth to examining the rest of it. The maker’s mark on his stomach is unfamiliar. Patrick traces the wings and frowns. Then again, if it’s a virus, the maker probably doesn’t want to be found.

“Whatever he is, he’s got a lot of power,” Patrick says uselessly. He wonders how Joe found them. How long it was until he woke up, or until the bot finally let go of him to power down.

“Think we can use him?” Joe asks. He’s still tracing easy fingers over the bot’s body, measuring up the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his torso.

“He’s a virus,” Patrick admits, frowning down at where Joe’s hand is splayed over the maker’s mark, trying to figure it out. “I couldn’t make out what kind though. There’s some serious damage to his software. I think a break in the code’s what knocked me out. That or he’s got some hardcore firewall installed.”

Patrick lifts the bot’s head and examines its face carefully. The craftsmanship is the best Patrick’s ever seen. There’s a faint seam at his hairline, and the mouth was made a little too wide, but it could pass as human if it weren’t for the glitches.

Together, Patrick and Joe flip the bot onto its front. The planes of his back are smooth and strong. The detail to anatomy is extraordinary. Patrick runs a hand over one shoulder blade, down to the small of his back. The padding inside feels almost like real, human muscle. At the base of his spine is the black mark of his access panel.

“Get my bag, will you?” Patrick asks, looking for the depressions of the panel. They’re almost invisible. Patrick presses down until the synth skin pops at the edges, reaching up to tug the square away.

Joe dumps his tool bag in front of him, flopping onto the floor next to the bot. He likes to be near when Patrick’s working, says he can feel the energy and electricity in the air. He’s not a techconnect, but Patrick wonders sometimes if he’s something like it. Or maybe it’s just compensation for his eyes, hypersensitivity to the world around him standing in for his vision. Patrick unscrews the plate of the access panel and eases it up gingerly. Inside, the bot’s wires are trashed.

“He shouldn’t have been able to get here,” Patrick says. There’s goosebumps winding up his arms. Half the wires at the opening are ripped apart, like someone had reached in and yanked. The frayed ends crackle as Patrick pokes around in them. The trauma of it makes sense. It’s probably what caused the bot to burn out. By all means, the bot should be completely dead.

He pulls his hand away long enough to tuck the edges of his jacket into the cuff of his glove before reaching back in. He closes his eyes, tries to feel the techs through the heavy layers. He’s trying to find its heart. He finds a melted heap of plastic instead.

“He’s got to have a backup generator somewhere,” Patrick mutters as he pulls his arm back out. The bot lays motionless, fingers curled against the floor. Patrick shivers and puts him back together.

“What are we going to do with him?” Joe asks.

It’s a good question. The technology is astounding, the caliber of regeneration nothing like he’s ever seen before. Part of him wants to take the bot apart for parts, for research. The rest of him wants to stitch it back to running capacity, wants to know what it was in the code that knocked him into blackout.

“I don’t know,” Patrick reluctantly answers. “I need to see it running. If it sparks up again, we’re going to have to eliminate it.” Harvest its insides and hope that it’s the last one to come. Patrick doesn’t know how this bot found them, but he doesn’t know what he’ll do if there’s more like it.

Normally, Patrick would be leaving, out to scavenge for food or parts. They’re running low on both, especially with Patrick’s failure the night before. He can’t leave Joe with the bot though, can’t take either with him. He’s stuck in the basement until they figure out what to do with it.

With nothing left to do, he swaps gloves, settles down at the processor, and looks over Joe’s handiwork, shoulders tight under his jacket. It’s going to be a long night.

\---

The bot reboots hours later. Joe’s passed out against Patrick’s legs, the little whirligig Patrick had pieced together for him ages ago still in the cage of his hands. Patrick’s been touching up Joe’s work, admiring it quietly. In another life, Joe could have been a grade A hacker.

Patrick pulls on the full coverage gloves and wiggles free from Joe, tucking him carefully under the workbench. His whirligig whines softly, folding up on itself as it drops to the floor. From the corner of the room, the bot’s systems click over, its eyes creaking open. Patrick’s heart hammers in his chest as it slowly raises to its feet.

“Stop,” he says, clear and sharp. Most bots have vocal recognition, are programmed to listen to the timbres of human voices. This bot, it doesn’t obey the logic. It’s nothing like Patrick’s ever dealt with.

He comes to a halt, bare torso like a shadow in the dim glow of the combustion bulb hanging overhead. It’s head cocks to the side, hair moving along with it. The eyes look bright. Intelligent. It’s frightening. Patrick curls his fingers in his gloves and forces himself to breathe evenly.

“Identify yourself,” he commands. He’d looked for a name plate, felt the bot from shoulders to ankles to try to find one, but it had been totally clean. The more Patrick learns- or doesn’t learn, really- the more it makes him worry. This thing is dangerous.

“Model P.E.T.E, obliteration o- o- o- o-” The bot’s voice chip spasms. His mouth moves, but the chip wheezes and stutters. His head jerks. Glitching. The bot lurches forward again and Patrick takes a step back. He’s covered up, but the thing’s already shown intelligence. He doesn’t want to test his luck.

“Stop,” he commands again, his voice wavering. Pete stumbles but keeps jerking forward. “Stop.”

Patrick tumbles back over his chair. The fall is like slow motion, his hands held back to catch him, his heart beating rapid fire in his chest. Pain shoots up his arms as he land, screaming agony in his veins as a distant crack sounds. It hurts, oh god it hurts, his right wrist pulsing, hand dangling limply from it no matter how hard he tries to move it. Joe’s up, eyes opened and blinking, trying to find him by sound.

“Stay there,” Patrick gasps through the pain, scrambling back until he slams into the wall. He’s trapped. Oh, god, he’s trapped. “Don’t move, Joe. Just stay still.” It’ll either make him a sitting duck or a well hidden body temperature. Patrick hopes it’s the latter.

Pete thumps down next to him, landing on his knees with a grinding metal clank. The synth skin there is too thin. Worn. His kneecaps might be showing under the cloth of his pants. Patrick squeezes his eyes shut and lists off his favorite techs in his head, tries to ignore that he’s going to die or be sucked into the bot’s malfunction until he goes crazy.

The bot’s hands wrap around his arm, freezing even through the thick layer of Patrick’s jacket. He pulls it up, Patrick’s wrist screaming as it’s jostled. Patrick keeps his eyes shut. He can’t look. Pete peels his sleeve up, a glitch making him jerk Patrick’s arm to the side. It hurts. God, it hurts so much.

Patrick can feel the hum of electricity under Pete’s skin, knows what’s coming. They should have just scrapped the bot for parts the second it woke up. He sees a flash of binary behind his eyelids as Pete wraps his fingers around the bare patch of Patrick’s arm, and then there’s the symbols again, flashing too quick for Patrick to recognize.

If he can just hang on for a nano, he might be able to see a shut off path, might be able to latch himself onto a strain of code that will take him back out of Pete’s systems and into himself. He doesn’t know a damn thing around him, but he’s got to try. He can’t just-

The red wall appears, the malfunction in the code, and Patrick smacks into it hard enough to go breathless. For a second, he can see through it, catches the binary of the virus program's heart, but before he can read it, he’s swallowed up by the malfunction.

wakes up, but it’s a close call. There’s a blanket tucked around him, pushed under his arms and legs like a cocoon. His jacket is missing, the fibers of the blanket scratching against his bare arms. It’s a lot of sensation, the heat under it sweltering. City dwellers aren’t used to heat. Patrick feels trapped.

“Where’s the bot?” Patrick asks, voice raw. It’s like a feedback loop.

“Sleeping in the corner,” Joe answers. When he notices Patrick thrashing under the cover to get free, he lays a hand on his leg to stop him. “It- It got me out from under the bench a while ago. Patrick, man, he can talk now.”

Together, they free Patrick from his synthetic cotton prison. The air outside it is freezing, city sinking in through the window and walls, but Patrick can breathe again. When he looks down, he sees his busted wrist wrapped up in a makeshift cast of metal plates and wires. He looks like a borg, like one of the techies that go nuts and try to become inhuman for kicks.

“Did you patch me up?” Patrick asks, even though he knows by looking alone that Joe wouldn’t have been able to do such a neat job. He tries to flex his fingers, only able to wince when the busted bones of his wrist grind against the plates.

“Pete did,” Joe answers. He looks so, so pale. “He’s not a normal tech. If his damage is as extensive as you say it is, he should be gettting worse. I think- Techie, he’s getting better.”

“Techs don’t work that way.” Patrick shoves himself up with his good hand and picks his way across the room to where Pete’s sprawled out. There’s a smudge of oil on his face, more on his knees. Joe must have given it to him and let him do whatever he had to do with it.

There’s wires spread across the floor in knots, loose parts like landmines on the cement. Patrick’s soldering gun lays near the bot’s legs. He glances down at his cast and sees the messy, uneven lines where Pete locked him in. Goosebumps prickle up his spine. Not a normal tech at all. Carefully, Patrick reaches out with his good hand, his full cover glove still between them like a shield, and tugs Pete onto his front.

“Joe. Bring my kit. I need you to unlock its access panel,” Patrick says nervously. He’s going to start ripping wires. It kills him to destroy such a beautiful piece of technology, but he’s already pushed his luck way too far.

Joe trips through the wires like a baby circuit hitting its first crawl, mumbling curses under his breath. He finally slumps down next to Patrick, the tool kit rattling at his side. Patrick instructs him through taking the skin panel off, sloppily unscrews the metal plate with his left hand. Joe peels back the metal panel and rests it against the wall gently.

The wires have mended.

Patrick’s throat clicks when he swallows, dry. He reaches in and thumbs through them, looking for the heap he’d seen the day before. Some are still busted, frayed ends sparking when they get too close together, but most of them have stitched back together like they’d never been snapped at all.

"He's fixing himself," Patrick says, awed.

Self regeneration has never been heard of on a bot. Especially nothing like repairing burnt out wires. The few tests that had been done on patrolbots had gone down into the databases as disasters. Techies had died in fires, had been killed in riots. Old religions had stepped up to call it an abomination. Said techies were trying to play God, to make a whole new race.

Patrick feels the lip of Pete's access panel and shivers again. This bot, could it be from the race riots? Was its maker one of the techies that were exiled before Patrick was even born?

“I’m taking it apart,” Patrick announces, too loud. His voice wavers, brain running calculations at hyperspeed. Some of the bots from the race riots were being programmed to be cogitative. To feel. Techies were making life without birth, trying to replicate humanity without its flaws. He doesn’t want to know if Pete- if this bot is one of them.

“Patrick, don’t-”

“Joe, stop.” Patrick puts his wrecked hand to his face, wipes away the sweat that’s gathered at his hairline. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out this time, either. His stomach aches with hunger, reminding him that he hasn’t been out for at least two days. This fucking bot is getting in the way of everything.

“Pete helped you,” Joe says. He lays across the bot’s back, blocking its access panel. He’s so young, kept locked up and naive, away from the city and the things it’s done to its citizens. “Pete helped you and he told me he was sorry for hurting you. He didn’t mean to do it.”

“Joe- it’s fucking dangerous,” Patrick snaps, reaching out to yank Joe away. He holds on, anchoring himself to the bot with balled up fists.

“He can help us,” Joe says stubbornly. He blinks at Patrick, mouth drawn tight. Fifteen going on six hundred. “Don’t take him apart.”

Patrick slumps back on his heels, tugging at his hair. He can’t tell Joe his theory. He can’t tell him how freaked out he is by the whole thing. This bot, it’s got enough power in it to rebuild itself at extraordinary speeds. He doesn’t want to know how powerful the virus it’s carrying is, or what it’s for.

“It can’t stay here,” Patrick says eventually, defeated.

He’s going to take it out of their basement, dump it in the valley, and start work on a security system. Hopefully it won’t boot up before he gets there, hopefully it won’t attract any patrolbots or register on the star cams. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully.

His stomach growls. He presses a hand to it through his tshirt and nods. Priorities.

Carefully, he climbs up to the window and peeks outside. The dark ground is empty, the boots of city dwellers absent. If he squints, he can see the outline of the main spire through the fog above the city, looming like a warning. Big Brother is always watching.

Together, Patrick and Joe cover Pete’s access panel back up. Joe dresses him, feeding Pete’s arms through his shirt and jacket carefully. Gently, like he’ll break. He’s probably sad to see it go. Patrick winces. Maybe he’ll build something for Joe to keep him company during the day. A little robocat maybe. He wishes he were more advanced, that they were like normal city dwellers. Joe deserves better.

It takes him a lot longer than usual to slide into his own jacket. He hisses when he bangs his cast against the wall, snatching it away to his chest and cradling it there until the ache fades. It’s going to be a long night. Gingerly, he tugs his full cover glove on over it. The leather bulges over the metal, fine lines of wires threading under it.

“I promise I’ll be back soon,” Patrick says as he gathers Pete up. The bot is heavy, dead weight that drags Patrick down as he climbs up to the window. He wants to promise that he’ll bring back foo too, but he can’t really be certain of that.

He shoves Pete out the window and skitters up behind him, thumping down onto the sidewalk with a little oof. The street is empty, wind blowing through it with a hollow whoosh. If he weren’t so used to seeing it, Patrick would call it eerie.

It takes too long to get Pete upright. Patrick hunches under him, shoulders tight. He feels paranoid, the short hairs at the back of his neck standing on end. Usually, he keeps his fingers to the walls, listens to the mainframe run so he can avoid hot spots. He can’t afford the open skin around the bot though. Being caught by patrolbot is one thing. Overloading in the middle of the city is another.

The trip to the warehouse district seems to take three times as long. Patrick keeps tripping over Pete’s dangling feet, needs to take breaks to rest his weak, tired arms. He doesn’t hit any bots along the way, but he has to do some fancy footwork to avoid a shiny new camera in the middle of an old residential.

When Patrick’s placing Pete very carefully at the mouth of an old factory, he hears the whir of Pete’s systems rebooting. Of course. That’s just what he needs.

“Patrick,” Pete says, stuttery and stiff. His mouth wraps around the words strangely, like he shouldn’t be saying it at all.

“You have to stay here,” Patrick says. He yanks his gloves up higher, hoping that the command will be enough.

“Patrick,” Pete says again. He blinks, dark eyes more human than any bot’s have the right to be. “Please, take me with you.”

Patrick shivers. Two days ago, the bot couldn’t speak. Yesterday, it could barely glitch out its model. It’s speed of recovery is frightening, the signs of its intelligence even more so. In the distance, a siren wails. Hackers. Virus planters.

“What’s your system for?” Patrick asks. He’s freezing, arms shaking with the cold. The spire has turned the heat down. If they go any lower, Patrick’s going to have to risk turning the heat up in their basement, risk exposing them just so they don’t freeze to death.

“Obliteration operation.” Pete’s wrist port isn’t bent anymore. It sticks out under the cuff of his lavender jacket, waiting to create havoc. “I can’t tell you the rest.”

“When were you made?” Patrick asks. He shouldn’t be talking to it. He should be running for the green district and begging for their suppers. But he can’t make himself go, even after all of it.

“Six fifth years ago,” Pete answers. The race riots were tailing off then, Patrick thinks with a stone in his stomach. The last of the bots were being destroyed then. The last of the rebel techies were being destroyed then.

“How-” Patrick swallows, dry mouth unable to make more sound. He’s frightened to ask the question, but he needs to know. “How are you regenerating?”

Pete smiles.

“You rebuild me from inside,” he answers. His voice, human, sounds rapturous. The siren in the distance howls again. The cold carries it in all directions, far enough to make Patrick wary. “My circuits have never felt this good. You reactivated me, Patrick. I belong to you now."

Pete lifts himself up, reaching for Patrick. Patrick flinches away. He could dismantle Pete right now and Joe would never know. It makes him feels sick to think it. He's never lied to Joe. He doesn't want to start now.

"Don't touch me," Patrick says tightly. "I don't want you."

Pete's face falls. It looks so disarmingly human. Patrick thinks about the databases with words like human emotion replicators and feels his stomach twist. He doesn't even know what to look for to find that kind of technology.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," Pete says miserably. He does look miserable, hunched in and small, his face scrunched. Those dark, human eyes trained on the sidewalk.

Patrick listens to the siren fade, feels his stomach growl. Thinks about Joe in their basement, alone and cold and hungry. This stupid bot, disrupting their lives. He doesn’t know how he’s going to keep things together without his strong hand. Building is going to be nearly out of the question.

“Let me show you how sorry I am,” Pete says. He tucks his hands into his pockets and looks up at the star cams. “I’ll get you something to eat. I didn’t mean to make you hurt your arm.” He smiles, hopeful. Patrick shakes his head and focuses himself. Bots don’t feel things. Bots don’t get hopeful.

“I don’t trust machines that I didn’t build,” Patrick says. He lifts his jaw, looking up at the thing’s eyes. Pete shrinks back. Even Greta’s reaction sensors aren’t this touchy.

“Please,” Pete says. “I want to help. I owe you.”

Patrick closes his eyes, tries to feel the city without his hands. It breathes under him, slow and patient. Waiting. Something isn't right. He can't tell what, not without spending some quality time inside the mainframe, but it buzzes under his skin, a living thing that makes him uneasy. Above, a star cam falls to the ground with a screech of grinding metal.

"I'm giving you a shot," Patrick says in a hurry. He needs to be back underground. Something’s going down. Pete smiles. His maker made his teeth too big. It's one flaw inside a mass of perfection.

"Go back," Pete says. "I'll bring food."

Food or an army, Patrick doesn't know. He runs back the way he came, feet slapping the concrete hard. If the processor's running right, he'll be able to hack their neighborhood feeds. Hopefully he can manage to grab a hunk of that star cam too. No time like the present to start on a security system.

Patrick cuts through an abandoned residency instead of taking his usual route. Before Big Brother moved the city dwellers into single unit apartments, Patrick's parents had lived here. It was too long ago for Patrick to remember much of it, but when he sees an overgrown yard with an old rocking horse in the front, he can almost remember their voices.

The star cam is in the middle of the neighborhood, smoke billowing from its torn wires. A spark flies from its center, yellow and blinding white. It's as tall as Patrick's knees, busted from the impact of the fall. It's innards should be golden though, peak for the use Patrick is imagining for it.

It nearly burns through his glove as Patrick wraps his fingers around a peak. He hisses, arm straining as he tries to lift it one handed. It's heavy. Risky. Going to slow him down as he tries to get back to the basement. On the upside, without Pete around he can tug off the glove on his bum hand and feel the city.

The walk is slow, but Patrick manages to lug the star cam to the basement. When he gets there, he kicks the window to let Joe know he's home. It takes some creative maneuvering, but he gets the body in and only has to drop it down a couple of feet. The clang makes him wince.

"Is he gone?" Joe asks once Patrick's shut the window. Patrick ignores him. There's no good answer to that.

"Help me take out the insides," Patrick says instead. He pops the back of the cam and guides Joe's hands to the lip. "I was thinking, maybe we can make a robocat." Joe's fingers are faster than Patrick's, plucking the wires apart and setting them to the side.

"Yeah," Joe says. Patrick tries not to feel disappointed at his lack of enthusiasm.

They finish breaking the star cam apart in silence. Patrick feels- guilty. Like he’s taken away Joe’s only friend in the world, which is total scrap because he’s Joe’s best friend. Still, he can’t help keeping an eye on the window as he works, stomach in knots as he waits. There’s something about Pete that makes Patrick stupid. That makes him want to believe.

Joe’s nearly passed out when there’s movement. Patrick pauses, fingers stiff from working through the night, the copper inside of the wire he’s rethreading making his skin ache. His heart is stuck in his throat, thudding an uneven tempo. There’s something almost funny about how full circle this has come.

Pete drops down much smoother this time, a pack in his hands. Joe stirs as Pete straightens up, but doesn’t ask. Probably figures Patrick threw something across the room in a fit of frustration. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I don’t eat,” Pete says as he opens the pack. Joe sits up straight, like a robopuppy hearing the sound of its master’s voice. “Is this enough?”

Inside are enough protein bars to feed an entire hoard of hackers. Patrick paws through them, mouth open as he takes in the sheer number. He’s only ever managed to nick one or two at a time, had to ration things out between them and the crackers handed out in the rebel shelters.

"How did you get these?" Patrick asks, awed.

"Pete?" Joe asks over top of him. He scrambles up, reaching out for him. Pete touches his hand and Joe smiles, wrapping his fingers around Pete's wrist. "Patrick didn't get rid of you."

Patrick elbows him, face heating up when he realizes he's embarrassed. Maybe he overreacted after all. He can feel Pete watching him, waiting for approval. Forgiveness, maybe. A sign that he did a good job.

"Thank you," Patrick says. His stomach feels strange when Pete beams at him. Light. Kind of twisty in a good way. He shakes it off as hunger, biting into his protein bar as a distraction. Pete hasn't answered him, and he's not sure he wants to know.

Patrick spends most of the night typing passwords into the rebuilt computer. He can hear Joe chattering at Pete, telling him stories Patrick’s heard hundreds of times. Pete answers him, talks like he’s human. Patrick’s trying not to listen, but his interest in Pete has been piqued. He’s comparing him to Greta and the rest of the bots he’s met, coming up short with each comparison. Pete’s different somehow.

It takes most of the night, but Patrick finally gets into the mainframe. He pumps his fist into the air, biting his lip to keep from cheering. There’s no hacker blood in him, not his suit. Pride bubbles up in his chest as he looks at the glowing green type flood his screen. Step one down. Now all he has to do it look for the patrolbot reports.

Joe guides him through, leaned in against his legs, listening to the commands. The information is vast, text and code raining down. When Patrick finally clicks on the reports, his eyes are dry, head fuzzy with exhaustion.

There’s been a breech of security somewhere in the old residential areas. Patrick’s heart thumps as he reads it over. The fallen star. It wasn’t an accident. He reads about the severed wires and the blackout of coverage in the area. The bots have been deployed to do extra detail.

“Warehouse district lockdown,” he reads out loud. There’s no other details, nothing else that can pinpoint why. “At least they waited.”

He looks through as many files as he can, but somewhere between a theft report and an arms shipment, he finds himself nodding off, teeth clacking when his chin hits his chest. Rubbing his bleary eyes, Patrick pushes away from the computer and stumbles over to where Joe’s curled up under the blankets, hands curled under his chest.

The city thermostat has been turned down by ten degrees. Patrick’s still wearing his gloves, heat pulsing back and forth from his body, but his joints are stiff with the cold. When he curls up around Joe, tucking his arms around the skinny, skinny body, he can feel the chill of his skin bleeding through their clothes. The metal plates of his cast feel like ice.

Patrick shivers and presses his face to the back of Joe’s neck. If it’s not one thing that’s going to kill them, its another.

He’s mostly asleep when he feels a heatwave slide between him and Joe. He grumbles, pressing against it. It’s soft, smells a little like oil. It warms his hands and puts feeling back into his legs, and when he rolls onto his front, he feels like he’s being held. There’s a flicker of a thought, of something like a memory, and then there’s code behind his eyes like a lullabye.

And then, there’s nothing.

\---  
Patrick dreams that he’s in the warehouse district. He feels like he’s on fire, a pain in his side so intense that it feels like he’s been ripped straight open. When he looks down, he sees wires sticking out between his fingers, a giant hole in his side. Oil leaks to the ground in puddles. Each step makes his vision fizzle.

There’s the sound of laser behind him, a sharp sound that accompanies a sudden burning in his chest that makes him wheeze. He fumbles into a dumpster, topples over and in. The world is black and his heart is dripping into his insides, and the men who ripped him apart are screaming through the streets.

He was created for good.

He was created for good.

He was created for-

\---

Patrick jerks awake sweating. He presses a hand to his side, breathing easier when he feels his skin sold and whole. Just a dream. When he opens his eyes, he sees the dark swipe of Pete’s hair, blurry so close up. That would explain the heat. Burning his processors on overdrive.

His fingers are loose and open, too close to Patrick’s bare wrist.

Carefully, Patrick frees himself from the tangle of Pete and Joe, shivering once he’s away from the heat. Today, he’s going to head out to Andy’s, see what he has to say about the districts going into shutdown mode. Patrick’s still a baby circuit with software. Hurley should be able to get any info about the situation in a nano.

Patrick changes, eying the lump of bodies in the corner as he does. Bots don’t really need sleep- their internal combustion keeps them running until its upset by an outside force- and even though Pete’s eyes are closed, Patrick feels like he’s being watched.

He sneaks out the window and aims himself at the blue district. The walk is mostly silent, the scuttle of rats keeping him company. He has to take the long way around the warehouse district, heart hammering in his throat when he catches a glimpse of a patrolbot. His scars ache when he sees the laser gun at its side.

He knocks three times on Andy’s door before slipping inside, breathing easier once he’s out of the open.

He met Andy during a raid, back when he’d been barely into his second fifth year. It had been bots versus hackers, a whole nest of them busted in the blue district. Patrick had been trying to scrounge for food, his very first faked credits card in his small hand, shaking in the cold. A laser had grazed his arm, a familiar flash of light that had made him freeze like a defunct program.

Before a second one could come for him, he’d been shoved out of the way, dropped to the ground by a solid, warm body. The quick burst of lasers that hit the spot where he’d been made Patrick light blind, tiny heart beating so fast he thought he would blackout.

“I got you,” Andy had whispered, so much older, stronger. He’d carried Patrick home, letting Patrick guide the path. It had been one of the first times Patrick had read the walls. When they got back to the basement, Andy settled him in next to Joe and cleaned his wound, shushed him when the noises outside got too loud. Patrick’s never been able to pay him back.

Andy is set up in his pod, hands strapped into the insides of the tech reader, eyes hidden behind a code visor. He wasn’t born a techconnect, but he’s duplicated the results almost faultlessly. His face looks sallow under the green glow of the pod, flickering as binary flashes in the visor.

“Your face is in the feeds,” Andy says, voice thick. Robotic. Synced so down into the machine that it’s probably dangerous.

“How?” Patrick asks. His hat hasn’t left his head in days. He’s made sure of it.

“Don’t know,” Andy answers. He ducks out of the visor, pulls his hands free. Patrick can see where the wires were starting to merge. He’s been in too long. “No articles, no words. Just your face. Watch yourself, techie. There’s something big coming and it’s coming for you.”

Patrick feels sick. He slumps against the wall and closes his eyes. His head hurts, stomach weak. He’s been so careful since day one. There’s the fleeting thought of Pete, but he shakes himself out of it quickly. He’d checked Pete for cams on day one and come up with nothing. Whatever got him got him fair and square.

“Energy readouts from your neighborhood have been massive,” Andy says. He holds a hot hand to Patrick’s forehead, feeds him whatever energy’s left in his veins. “You get a new tech?”

“A bot,” Patrick says. He swallows and shakes free of Andy’s hands. He doesn’t feel like being treated like a child. “He’s- It’s a virus program.”

Patrick tells him everything, from the self regen to the the power bars, mentions his theory about the race riots. He stumbles over the weird feeling in his chest when he’s near Pete, wondering if it’s a side effect from being inside his wiring so much. Andy grins but doesn’t say anything, motioning for him to go on.

“There’s a block in his code. A firewall or a malfunction.” Patrick thumps his head against the wall and stares down at his gloves. “I keep smacking into it when I try to figure out what he was made for.”

“He’s probably the reason for the energy surge,” Andy says. He tugs at the tied end of his bandanna, freeing a few thick, springy curls. “You said his heart was melted?” Patrick is hit with a flash from his dream that makes him shudder.

“Yeah. Completely toasted,” Patrick mumbles. It’s kind of sad.

“He’s using his core generators to stay powered,” Andy says thoughtfully. “It takes nearly three times the amount of energy than if he were using a heart pump. You might want to shut him down until you can find a replacement.”

It seems wrong somehow to shut Pete down. He’s not a thing. Not anymore. Patrick rubs his arms through his coat and thinks about how much has changed in so little time. He can’t afford to go looking for a dead bot to steal its heart, but even if he could that seems wrong too.

“You got any spare parts?” Patrick finally asks, sighing.

He’s going to build his bot a heart.

\---

Pete is on him as soon as Patrick’s back in the basement. His skin is hot, the dark marks on his arms almost unbearably so. Joe’s curled up on the bed, fingers scanning a pre-tech book, reading the bumps on the page. The blankets pulled up around him look incredibly warm and inviting.

“You look cold,” Pete says, wrapping his arms around Patrick’s middle. That weird little flutter in Patrick’s chest comes back two fold, making him choke on his tongue. Pete’s skin is so soft, his body so warm. The whir of his processors make Patrick’s eyes heavy. He feels. Nice.

Patrick spends way too long enjoying the heat and the sound, wavering on his feet. The past few days have been the longest of his life. It’s not until his sack of parts hits the ground that he remembers what he was supposed to be doing at all.

“Heart,” Patrick mumbles into Pete’s throat. “I need your heart.”

Pete goes easily, laying on his stomach next to Joe. He’s never bothered putting his jacket back on, comfortable without it. It transfers his heat better any way, without the barrier. Patrick glances over the planes of his back and squirms. No tech’s ever made him act like- like this, whatever it is. He runs a hand down Pete’s spinal column. The heat bleeds through his glove.

“Turn down your heater,” Patrick says as he reaches for the access panel. Pete complies, but the residual heat still lingers, curling up Patrick’s arm as he places the hot, hot metal back onto the floor.

Pete’s systems are totally healed.

Patrick marvels at it, touching his insides like a fresh faced tiny tech, like he’s never seen a bot’s parts before. He reaches in carefully, tries not to burn himself on the heated boards, and hopes that maybe Pete’s heart was repaired too. It would make sense, really, if the rest of him healed.

The heart is no better. If anything, it’s worse.

Patrick thumbs apart the connectors, hearing the click of all of Pete’s functions turning onto his core generator. When he pulls it out, he’s shocked by the extent of the damage. He’s going to have to start from scratch.

Pete watches with interest as Patrick pulls off his gloves and gets to work, stripping the old heart of workable materials and studying the build. He’s quiet, warmth pulsing off him as his generator works double. It’s nice having him there. Patrick reaches for his soldering gun and pushes away a pang of guilt. He wouldn’t really have scrapped Pete. Not really.

The work is easy. Comforting, even with the hassle of working around his cast. Patrick cradles the material like its a child, wiring the valves tenderly, shaping the synthtech skin with gentle fingers. He presses a wire to the outside skin, melts it down, and hums when he feels it connect. His hands have been hidden so long that he’s almost forgotten what it feels like to really connect with something.

“You’re really good,” Pete says, starting Patrick. He doesn’t know how long he’s been working. Joe had come by once, listened to him work for a bit and then curled up at their legs and passed out, leeching off their warmth. Now that he’s stopped, Patrick can feel the dryness of his eyes, the soreness of his fingertips.

“Thanks,” he says. His chest flutters. Maybe Pete’s virus has worn off on him. He holds up the heart and examines his handiwork. “It should be good. Want me to put it in?”

“Please.” Pete lays flat, head pillowed on his hands, and Patrick drops down next to him. He nearly forgets to pull his gloves back on, too excited to think straight. This level of tech, it’s so high above anything he’s even dreamt of doing before.

Putting the heart in one-handed is more difficult than taking it out had been. Patrick takes his time, hums under his breath as he connects it in. This is important. He has to do it right.

After Patrick places Pete’s panels back on, he rolls him onto his back, ready to feel the thump of it starting up. Pete’s eyes have gone blank, his mouth open. The smile that’s been stretching Patrick’s face falls away, panic swelling up through him. What did he do wrong?

He can feel the throb of Pete’s heart going at breakneck speeds under his hand. Did he make it too strong? Can he get it back before it overloads Pete’s systems? He reaches for Pete’s shoulders, starts to turn him onto his stomach, but a hand shoots out and grabs the back of his head, pulls him forward fast enough to make his hat fall off. There’s a few nanos where all Patrick can think is Pete’s kissing me before a fall of code takes him over.

It’s beautiful.

Pete’s code is whole, the error symbols traded out for binary. Patrick reads as much as he can, dizzy with the sheer amount of it. His backup systems are unbelievable. Patrick keeps waiting for the malfunction to come, but he knows that it won’t. That Pete’s fixed for good.

He stumbles backward when Pete lets him go, breathless. His mouth feels damp, swollen. Of course his first kiss would be with a bot. There's the buzz of static still in his mouth when Patrick reaches forward to touch Pete's chest. He can feel the heart beating steadily. It took. It really took.

"Mainframe," he blurts, looking up. Pete's face is bright. Alive. "You were made to destroy the mainframe."

His code- all of it, the vast expanse that had confused him inside- it's got the power to wipe out Big Brother from the inside, straight from the center of his systems. It's terrifying and wonderful and stupid enough to be just what the city needs to set it free.

"My maker," Pete says slowly, measuring his words, "was killed for making me."

"And then they ripped apart your systems," Patrick finishes breathlessly. His dream. Pete was created for good.

There's a crash in the back of the room and Patrick jerks away, tripping over his feet. Joe scrambles backwards, diving under the workbench. There's a second of panic before Patrick remembers that there's no way in but the window.

Cautiously, he heads to the back, fingers curled into fists. He's aways been more brain than brawn, but he'll scrap his way out if he has to.

There's a light coming from the monitor, making the back wall glow green. Patrick steps around the desk and looks down at it, mouth dry. There, blinking every three seconds are thick, black letters that have taken over the screen.

BIG BROTHER IS ALWAYS WATCHING.

Patrick recoils. The letters blink a few more times before a spark flies from the back of the monitor. Patrick can smell the burning plastic before the first small explosion goes off. A shard of plastic catches him across the cheek, narrowly missing his eye. He blanks out, arms and legs numb, and comes to across the room, breathless like he's been running.

"We have to leave," he gasps out. Joe is next to him immediately, feeling his arms and chest and face, pausing when he feels blood.

"Patrick, what's happening?" He asks, voice high with panic. Joe hasn't set foot outside the basement in years, kept secluded and safe. Patrick's heart aches thinking about taking it away from him, about running away.

"Big Brother sent us a warning," he says around the lump in his throat. The sticky line of drying blood on his cheek makes him feel ill. "We have to go. Get your things. Pete, if we wanted to run your program, where would we do it?" They’re going to get Big Brother before Big Brother gets them.

"Any port in a storm," Pete recites. It sounds foreign, old speak. Something from before the mech ways took over. "Something with a lot of power."

Andy's place.

Joe comes to them with Patrick's backpack filled with clothes and food, his whirligig clutched in his hand like an anchor. He's pale, just as terrified as Patrick is. They're both so, so young. Patrick tugs him in, holds him close. Joe's solid and familiar. Family.

Patrick pulls back and settles his hat over Joe’s messy hair. Big Brother already has his face. They don’t get to have Joe’s too. Together, he and Pete help Joe scramble up the wall, tossing the bag after him. Patrick looks around the basement, heart heavy in his chest. This place is his home, all he’s ever had. He’s going to miss it.

Patrick traces the walls, fingers of his bad hand curled around Joe’s. He can see the new patrol plan overlaid over the streets, pulsing at data speed. Usually, they’re not so open with the city plans. Patrick swallows and takes a turn away from a patrol plan. They want him, and they want him bad.

They know Pete’s been rebooted.

Andy is plugged in when they finally reach his apartment, shaking and numb. Joe’s lips have gone white, corners just shy of blue. Climate control dropped another five degrees. Patrick can barely feel his fingers.

“They just set your place on fire,” Andy says, eyes flicking behind his visor. Patrick feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

"Pete's a virus for the mainframe," he says when he can breathe again. All he can see behind his eyes is home burning down to the ground. Andy ducks out of his computer, face smudged with oil.

“Mainframe?" He asks, eyeing Pete critically. "I thought you said he'd been trashed?"

"Patrick fixed me," Pete says. He rolls up his sleeves, tapping his wrists. The ports open, flashing silver. "He's amazing." Patrick feels himself go hot and has no idea why. He looks away, watches Joe feel around Andy's place with a childish sense of wonder.

"Kind of, yeah," Andy agrees. “What are you doing here?”

"Can we use your computer?" Patrick asks. He knows Andy won't say no, knows he's been looking for a hole in Big Brother's security systems since he was a baby circuit. They all have, really. Andy shrugs and steps away, joining Joe at the window. Patrick can almost see the spire from it.

Watching Pete hook up is nerve wracking. Patrick holds his breath and fights the urge to strip off his gloves and touch Pete, to watch him destroy the city from the inside. Instead, he kneels down next to Pete and stares at the screens. This will have to do.

The code that takes over the screens is the same as Patrick saw during the malfunctions. There's pages of it, an endless mass of binary being fed into the system. He can feel Pete radiating heat again next to him, arm sweating where it's pressed to Pete's leg.

He hears the first crash outside ten minutes later. It's an automatic reaction to race towards Joe, to curl around him like a full body shield. Outside, the sky looks like a fire, red and orange and blue, the weather control system glitching between day and night. A star cam crashes to the ground a few feet away, sparks flying.

"Pete-" Patrick turns to- to- to do something, but Andy grabs him. The whole city’s crashing.

"You stop him now, the whole city will go up in flames," Andy says. Pete's eyes are flickering, no longer human, racing the virus through the mainframe. "Let him finish." Joe holds out a hand, face turning shades of blue and pink and gold as the sky cycles through its systems. Patrick takes it and joins him at the window, watches the sky for signs.

One by one, the lights in the spire flicker off.

"Big Brother," Andy says, face nearly against the glass, "was built in 2058. It took thirty years to get into power." The signal tower blows, raining down like a meteor shower. A passing patrolbot glitches. Dies. "Without the machines, it's going to be anarchy."

Out of the gates of the city, citizens stumble into the streets, blinking up at the sky in a stupor. Their white uniforms look so stark against the walls, glowing in the flickering skylight. Some point to the spire, a hush falling over them. Patrick hears another star cam crash to the ground, hears Pete's system hum.

"They're not trapped anymore," Joe says. There's no way he can see the citizens, no way he can know. Patrick can hear I'm not trapped anymore under it.

A child, a baby circuit no bigger than Joe had been the first time Patrick had seen him, lets out a squeal of delight when a passing patrolbot lets out a flurry of sparks, a light show in the middle of the crowd. Another farther down street does the same. A third.

Then, as one, the citizens cheer.

It's deafening, even from inside. It blocks out the sound of Pete unhooking himself, blocks out the sound of him falling to the ground. Patrick feels the vibrations of the floor, notices the lack of energy in the room, nearly trips over himself when he sees Pete sprawled on the floor.

"I did it," Pete says when Patrick drops down next to him. He smiles, too big teeth on display, eyes eerily human once more. When Patrick touches him there’s no code left to read, no malfunction to fall into. Just him and Pete and Big Brother falling to pieces outside.

“Yeah,” Patrick says, listening to the cheering. He thinks about Pete’s dead maker and his own dead parents, thinks about Joe’s eyes and Andy’s wireburn scars. Thinks about the citizens free from their mechanical tyrant.

Anarchy is coming. There’s no doubt about it.

“What now?” Patrick asks, pushing Pete’s hair away from his face. There’s slickness there, just under his hairline. When Patrick passes his fingers over again, he realizes it’s sweat.

In the old times, when there were still stories to tell, there was a story about a wooden bot. It’s maker loved it so much that it came to life, that it turned human. Patrick feels Pete’s face, touches his cheeks and mouth and throat. There’s no script, no murmur of the cybernetics inside him. The race riots, the bots that could have been human, all lost in fires because of confusion.

“I always wanted to see what the outside looks like,” Andy says from behind them. He’s got an arm around Joe’s shoulders, face wet too. Joy. Overwhelming, overpowering joy.

“Me too,” Joe says. He grins, grey eyes unfocused and bright. “Well. You know.”

Life outside the city. Away from the burned out ruins, away from the chaos that is sure to follow, away from the people that will inevitably want to study him for his freakishness. There’s nothing here for them. Pete sits up, laughs as he stares at his hand in Patrick’s.

“You too?” Patrick asks him, that funny twist in his stomach familiar and warm. Pete smiles, big and broad, the skin- the real skin- around his eyes crinkling.

“You reactivated me,” Pete says, feedback loop from days ago. “I belong to you now.”

Patrick looks at Andy and Joe, studies the black marks on Pete’s arms that have faded under his skin. The only things he has, all of them waiting for his decision. He pushes himself up with his good hand, Pete following after him.

“Yeah,” he says, feeling light and young for the first time since he was a baby circuit. “Let’s go.”

He’s not going to be a rat anymore.


End file.
